🔒It takes a team

“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves — to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today, to do our work with more force than ever before.”

— Stewart B. Johnson

Volatile market conditions, the encroachment of competitors, new technologies, recessions. Over the past 20 years, Mainebiz has weathered all of these threats. You probably have, too. Yet I recognize that our biggest challenge was, and is, managing ourselves.

We struggle with finding the best ways to spend our limited resources. And sometimes it's a small investment that can make a difference: I remember when purchasing a plain paper fax was an occasion for celebration — we felt liberated from the slowly chugging machine spewing out shiny curly paper.

How do we really know what customers want and need? I'm proud of the way that Mainebiz has brought back the face-to-face interaction — our events encourage us to put down the smart phones and laptops and talk to each other.

The way we do business is changing rapidly — how do we encourage our team to be lifelong learners in order to compete? I remember how the sales team struggled when we put personal desktops with a CRM tool in front of them — they were reluctant to work without their Rolodex and a yellow pad! And designers, with no X-Acto knives, designing web pages? Reporters taking videos? The learning curve has been steep.

How do we maintain the high standard of quality we set for ourselves story after story, event after event, year after year? When you ask us, “Who is your biggest competitor?” We say, “We are!” We are the ones we are trying to beat. We strive to one-up ourselves and exceed our readers' and advertisers' expectations of us.

We may have had a modest start, and we may be small in number, but we have a very big impact and influence. We are Maine's business news source. Happy 20th, Mainebiz.

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Mainebiz presents a 20-year retrospective of doing business in Maine